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Posted by zoom! on June 13, 2008, at 9:00 pm |
I went to the Shepherds of Good Hope down in the Market today, for my volunteer orientation session. It was interesting. They explained the programs they run, the volunteer positions available, and the health and safety rules. There were forms to fill out, including a criminal background check, and I had to give them copies of my passport and driver’s license.
I didn’t know this, but they operate four different shelters in the same building, including a managed alcohol shelter (alcohol in measured quanitities is prescribed and dispensed at set intervals. It’s a harm reduction program for alcholics who are at extremely high medical risk.) And they operate several other buildings which provide supportive living programs.
They run a volunteer-intensive operation down there. They have over a hundred paid staff (full and part-time) and over 400 volunteers.
They’re looking for all kinds of people with all kinds of interests. For example, right now they need volunteer gardeners. They have a big organic garden and they need people to work in it. They have a shortage of people who can teach music and people who can run crafting workshops. They need translators and cleaners and cooks and pastoral counselors.
I’m going to be a server either in their evening drop-in program or at the women’s shelter. I have to commit to a regular four-hour shift each week for six months. (That part was a bit daunting, actually.)
Some of the rules: you can’t socialize with the clients outside of the shelter, you shouldn’t give them anything (cigarettes, money, etc.), you can’t wear sandals or short shorts or plunging necklines or t-shirts advertising liquor, and you mustn’t intervene in any kind of situation involving physical or verbal altercations. Your responsibility as a volunteer is to remove yourself from such a situation and get behind a closed door so that staff can intervene without having to worry about your safety (they already have to worry about their own safety and the client’s).
As a matter of fact, even the staff are not permitted to physically intervene in an altercation, because Shepherd’s is a “no-touch” shelter. If a situation requires physical intervention, each staff member is wearing an emergency pendant – they press it, and it summons Emergency Services: police, fire and ambulances are immediately dispatched to the shelter. (I’m only going on about this only because I found it interesting; apparently physical altercations inside the shelter are infrequent.)
After I left the shelter I dropped into La Petit Mort art gallery, just around the corner. While I was there, the owner was chatting with another guy and the subject of Crazzy Dave came up. Remember Crazzy Dave, the poetry busker who lives behind Chapters? Things are looking good for him these days. He just published a book – it was hot off the press today. At $40 I don’t think I’ll be buying a copy, but I did get to peruse the Petit Mort’s copy and read Crazzy Dave’s inscription – it was beautiful. Something about a golden soul. Next Thursday June 19th from 7 p.m. till 10 is Crazzy Dave’s book launch.
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Posted by zoom! on June 12, 2008, at 8:46 pm |
As you’ve probably heard, the funding for two residential drug treatment centres for youth was announced Tuesday – a 15-bed facility for English-speaking kids, and a 5-bed facility for French-speaking kids.
Better than nothing, I suppose. But I predict the effects will be negligible. Most of the addicts I see would not qualify for treatment at either of these facilities, because they’re not kids. If you’re over 17, it seems we’ve already given up on you.
Add to that the fact that lots of addicts in the early years of their addiction have no desire to quit. They still like their drugs. They like their friends on the street, the community, the sense of belonging. They’re still happy with the lifestyle. They’re not seeking treatment for their addiction because they don’t want to give it up. In many cases, it’s making them happier than they’ve ever been before.
In most cases, they won’t be ready to quit till they’re too old to qualify for treatment in Ottawa.
So I don’t understand why there has been such a narrow focus on getting a facility to treat youth, while providing no options for the more typical addict.
Mayor Larry’s pretty pleased with himself too for allocating $250,000 a year of our tax dollars to prevention. This so-called prevention strategy is also disappointing. Mayor Larry sees that money being used to educate schoolchildren on the dangers of drugs. I agree with Dan Gardner’s assessment (Ottawa Citizen, May 31 2008):
As for prevention, well, that’s a terrific idea. Except that real prevention means dealing with the social decay — broken families, mental illness, illiteracy — that promotes drug abuse. This government seems to think prevention means running television commercials as vapid and worthless as the Reagan-era “this is your brain on drugs” ad that is the classic of the genre.
This is absolutely key, in my opinion. Real prevention means ensuring that kids grow up with their physical, emotional, material, recreational and social needs being met. It means creating healthy neighbourhoods, tackling the social conditions that cause alienation and depression and boredom, and making sure that kids have legitimate alternatives to drugs, like free recreation, part-time jobs, and adults who have time for them.
I know Mayor Larry and the Police Chief are basking in the glow of what feels like success right now. But I think they got it wrong again, and Ottawa’s addict community will continue to grow.
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Posted by zoom! on June 12, 2008, at 12:27 am |
 I had so much fun tonight: it might even be worth the guilt I’m going to feel in the morning.
Stuart used to host the weekly Thursday night potluck barbecues in Mechanicsville. Now he owns a B&B on the River Kwai, and he has weekly Saturday night barbecues. They sound very similar to the Thursday night barbecues, except he raises and slaughters the meat himself now. (He explained how; I was suitably traumatized.)
 Stuart’s home for a short visit, and Ruth hosted a barbecue in the Glebe tonight so we could all get together just like old times. Even though almost all of us live in Ottawa, some of us need someone like Stuart to organize our social lives, otherwise we never get together. I saw lots of people tonight who I like very much, but who I haven’t seen since Stuart moved to Thailand a year and a half ago.
The timing wasn’t ideal for me, since I had a monthly board meeting tonight for a volunteer thing I do. I honestly had every intention of stopping by Ruth’s for an hour or so after work, having a beer, saying hi to everybody, and heading off to my meeting.
But you know how it is. One beer leads to another, and one conversation flows into the next, and you figure you’ve still got enough time to get to the meeting if you take a bus, and half an hour later you figure you can still make it to the meeting if you take a cab, and then someone comes up with a perfectly rational set of reasons why you should prioritize the party over the meeting, and suddenly all the food’s ready and then someone thrusts a bowl of raspberries at you, and that’s it. You open another beer, you grab a hunk of meat and some raspberries, and you promise yourself you won’t miss another meeting ever again (except for next month, because you’re going to be out of town on the second wednesday…).
It was wonderful to see everybody again.
(Oh, and Ruth is giving me a dining table, so if you come to my place for dinner you won’t have to eat at the coffee table. And Zita’s giving me a fireplace, so if you come for Christmas, bring your stocking.)
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Posted by zoom! on June 10, 2008, at 6:04 pm |
 Last night I went to a lovely little backyard party to help my old friend Donna celebrate her brand new PhD.
There were lots of interesting people at this party, and good conversation and food and wine and cake.
I’ve known Donna since I was 12 or 13. When I was 15 and she was 25, she took me into her home for the summer because things were bad and I needed help. There probably aren’t that many 25 year olds who would do that, but Donna did. Not only that, but she navigated the child welfare system for me and got me hooked up with other people who could help me. She was a lifesaver.
Sometimes we go years without any contact, but Donna often seems to magically and spontaneously reappear at pivotal points in my life.
There’s just something special about her. She’s like a real live guardian angel. (Not just to me, either; I believe she’s magically entwined in other people’s lives too. She’s even magically entwined in some dogs’ lives.)
She also has a wicked sense of humour and a love of puns, and you would love her. I know this because everybody loves her. Seriously. If her name comes up in conversation, everybody says, “Oh, I know Donna; I LOVE Donna!”
She’s led an interesting life so far, and the PhD is just the latest in a very eclectic list of things she’s done. I’m looking forward to seeing what she does next. (Actually, I don’t even know a fraction of what she’s done. I’m always saying things like “I didn’t know you took Chinese lessons!” and “You have students? What do you teach?”)
 Here’s Donna with her sister Arlene, who also just graduated last week and who published her first novel, Paper Trail, last year. They’re both pretty remarkable, actually.
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Posted by zoom! on June 8, 2008, at 8:44 am |
 I went to Art in the Park yesterday, which is a phenomenal outdoor art sale.
I really wanted to buy art. I was ready to buy art. I was certain I would buy art.
I spent three hours looking at art but I did not buy art.
I think it’s my Libra nature. I just could not decide which art to buy, so I bought no art. There were lots of pieces I liked, but I needed to see one which overpowered me and consumed me and screamed “YOU CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT ME.”
Didn’t happen.
(There was one that came close, by Denise Dowdy, but I couldn’t afford to not live without it.)
 I did buy a pottery mug starring Duncan though. Chandler Swain made it. I searched through all the mugs, looking for one for David Scrimshaw. David just acquired a cat named Drexel and I thought a Drexel mug would be a nice “congratulations on your new cat” gift.
I don’t know why, but Chandler Swain doesn’t make mugs with ancient, boney, funny-looking, three-legged cats on them.
I’m sure once Drexel becomes the “next super star cat of the blog-o-sphere,” as David predicts she will, Chandler Swain will make a Drexel mug.
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Posted by zoom! on June 5, 2008, at 9:26 pm |
 InSite is the only supervised drug injection site in North America, and it’s located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
“Insite is supported by a broad range of organizations and individuals including the City of Vancouver, the Province of British Columbia, Vancouver Coastal Health, Premier Gordon Campbell, Minister David Emerson, Senator Larry Campbell, Vancouver Police Chief Jamie Graham, Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan, former Vancouver Mayor Phillip Owen, injection drug users, community groups, local businesses, academic institutions and others.”
In order to legally continue its work after the end of the month, Insite needs an extension of its exemption from the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. The BC Supreme Court recently ruled that Insite should get this extension because it provides a vital health care service which is protected under the Charter.
But the Harper government does not like Insite and plans to appeal the Court’s ruling.
 Never mind that the research clearly supports the program. Never mind that it has led to a reduction in crime and a 45% reduction in open drug use in the area. Never mind that there is a 33% increase in the use of addiction treatment as a result of contact with InSite. Or that it saves lives. Or that it even saves money while saving lives.
No. The Harper government, in its profoundly simple view, wants to base Canada’s drug policy on its own simplistic ideology: drugs are bad, therefore drug programs are bad. Screw the evidence. Screw the wisdom and experience and knowledge of all the front-line workers, health care professionals and researchers who know infinitely more about addictions than Conservative politicians would ever want to know. The only thing that matters is that this government has the power and the will to inflict its own ideology on everybody else.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rally attended by so few members of the general public and so many Members of Parliament. Among others, Libby Davies, Hedy Fry, and Ken Dryden spoke in favour of allowing InSite to keep saving lives.
The InSite campaign is a powerful one.
 They enlisted the help of those of us in attendance to help unload a U-Haul they’d driven to Ottawa from Vancouver. It was full of wooden crosses. While listening to various renditions of Amazing Grace over the loudspeakers, we set up the crosses right in front of the Peace Tower – rows and rows and rows of hundreds and hundreds of crosses.
I thought maybe the crosses represented the number of addicts who died each year. But it turned out that each cross represented a person who did not die of an overdose because their overdose took place at the InSite facility. There have been over 800 overdoses at InSite, but because it’s staffed by health care professionals, not one person died.
The photographs were the most moving part of the event for me. All of the photographs were provided by users of InSite’s services: photographs of themselves as children, before they became addicted to drugs. The slogan is “Before they were ‘junkies’ they were kids.”
 We can lose our children so quickly and easily to drugs. It’s disturbing how dehumanizing we can collectively be towards addicts. I think that the Harper government’s efforts to shut down InSite, and the City of Ottawa’s attempts to shut down the crack kit program, are both examples of this dehumanization. Harm reduction programs don’t seem unreasonable when you think of addicts as human beings. I imagine if you’re the parent of an addict, harm reduction programs represent the hope that your child will survive until she can quit.
The bottom line is that InSite saves lives and provides addicts with access to health care professionals. I don’t think anybody can look at the evidence and dispute that fact. More likely, I think, is that Conservative politicians dispute that addicts’ lives are, in fact, worth saving.
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Posted by zoom! on June 5, 2008, at 8:30 am |
My dear friend and knitting guru is having some pretty serious surgery today, and will be off work, recuperating, for most of the summer.
To keep ourselves occupied over the past couple of weeks, my coworkers and I have been preparing gifts for her recovery. All eight of us have been collecting things that will entertain and amuse her. It hasn’t been hard because she’s really a big kid at heart, and she’s got many eclectic interests and hobbies.
Whoever said accountants are boring has obviously never met our accountant. She’s into everything: football, medieval history, romance novels, Shakespeare, science fiction, old movies, comic books, needlecrafts, chocolate, junk food, green tea, mythology, motorcycles, theatre, opera and Wallace and Gromit. She’s a wealth of information about all kinds of things, and she’s a lot of fun to shop for. (I did most of my shopping at the Great Glebe Garage Sale.)
 On Tuesday we took all the gifts that we had collected and laid them out on the board room table. Then we grouped them into individual days, starting with a summoning bell and a movie for the first day and moving gradually towards more active pursuits as she recovers. We finished off the series with a bottle of wine and outdoor doggie toys for the 32nd day. We figure by then she’ll be well enough to get tipsy and go to the dog park.
Then we wrapped every tiny little thing, tied each day’s gifts together with ribbon and labelled each bundle Day 1, Day 2, etc. Our board room looked like Christmas. (Or, as Angela said, an 8-year-old’s birthday party.)
Posted by zoom! on June 4, 2008, at 6:15 pm |
 Duncan is such a big old puddin’ head. He can be so sweet and lovable at times and he can be so annoying at other times.
Sometimes he follows me around the house meowing incessantly for no good reason. If I’m sitting at the computer and he doesn’t want me there, he harasses me for awhile and then he reaches up, unsheaths his lethal claws, and pierces the back of my shirt and my topmost layer of skin. He can be a real prick when he feels like it.
And yet, come bedtime, he jumps into bed with me, positions himself exactly where he wants to be, topples over and lands lovingly in the crook of my right arm with his purring face on my cheek, and then he wraps his right arm right around me. He’s such a sweetheart about bedtime. He smells like baby powder and he’s downy soft and he rumbles gently till I fall sleep.
On a good night he lets me sleep all night. If we drift apart and I snuggle back up to him during the night, he turns his purr back on so I can go right back to sleep. He’s an insomniac’s dream.
He doesn’t believe in sleeping in, though. During the week the alarm is set for 5:00 am, and Duncan’s usually okay with that. On the weekends, however, I think it would be kind of sweet to sleep in a bit – maybe till 6:30 or 7:00 – but Duncan disagrees. He thinks we should get up at 5:00 and feed the cat. He’s pretty insistent about it too. We usually play “Who’s most stubborn, you or me?” till about 6:00, then I concede defeat and get up.
Maybe he just loves morning as much as he loves bedtime. There’s something to be said for being in love with whatever time of day it happens to be.
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Posted by zoom! on June 3, 2008, at 8:14 pm |
The bad news is that the Swap Box on Primrose was stolen and the one at Percy and Gladstone was vandalized. If that weren’t bad enough, the Plexiglass Flower Box at Percy and Gladstone was gone when I passed by there at 6:30 yesterday morning.
But don’t despair! There’s good news too:
Andrea from the Fishbowl says she’s got a Swap Box ready for painting and installing on the most deserving telephone pole in Westboro.
The Swap Box Keeper of Primrose says she’s pretty sad hers was stolen, but she will put up a new one in time, after she heals. (Please tell me when you do that, SBK of Primrose, so I can blog it.)
Elmaks, the original Swap Box Artist, says “Ephemerality is one of the qualities of street art, so I expect that eventually the Boxes will get taken down. How long they last depends on how people in the neighbourhood treat them and the attitude that city crews take.”
The Percy and Gladstone Swap Box’s message and giraffe remain intact (as always, you can click for a larger version).
A brand new Art Exchange Box has already sprung up right beside the giraffe!
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Posted by zoom! on June 3, 2008, at 9:21 am |
Mayor Larry stated on his blog on Sunday that he’s meeting today with Philip Mangano to discuss homelessness. Mangano is George W. Bush’s “homeless Czar.”
I left a comment on Larry’s blog on Sunday asking if there would be any opportunities for the public to attend speeches, debates, presentations, etc. by Mangano. My comment never appeared on Larry’s blog, nor did anybody respond to my inquiry.
I suspect the Mayor is not yet clear on the two-way nature of blogging communications.
At any rate, if anybody else knows what Philip Mangano is doing today, please let me know. I’m very interested in what he has to say.
He’s apparently making quite an impression in Canada, garnering the support of some front-line workers and housing and homelessness activisits, and convincing quite a few Canadian muncipalities to adopt his Housing First approach and create 10-year plans to end homelessness. He argues that it is more cost-effective to house the homeless than to leave them unhoused.
On the surface, his approach sounds good, although I’ve always found the cost/benefit argument both questionable and crass. Still, I like the idea of housing the homeless without making their housing contingent on anything. People cannot be expected to do anything beyond surviving when they don’t even have a roof or a bathroom.
However, Mangano’s approach is not universally endorsed by the housing and homelessness activists, and I have a lot of respect for some of his critics, such as street nurse Cathy Crowe, housing policy wonk Michael Shapcott, and journalist Linda McQuaig.
I myself haven’t made up my mind, and would very much welcome an opportunity to hear Mr. Mangano speak. Ideally, I’d like to attend a debate. I hope he’s not just doing a closed-door meeting with the mayor today.
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